'Ultima Forever' Review: The Folly Of Lady British

Electronic Arts’ free-to-play mobile MMORPG Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar has arrived on iOS. On the surface, Ultima Forever appears to be a shining example of the mobile game coming into its own as a legitimate gaming experience, a wonderful hack-and-slash romp through fantasy fields and dungeons with content tailored from five-minute to five-hour sessions.

The graphics and audio are great, the controls are simple and efficient, and the gameplay is the sort of thing that made the Diablo franchise a success. It’s addictive, it’s engaging, and it’s honestly just the kind of thing to highlight the transition of mobile titles from casino and card smartphone offerings to games often associated with more robust gaming platforms.

There’s just one small problem. The same aggressive microtransactions that mar many a mobile title are in full swing here, forcing players into an uncomfortable grinding stasis or to complete the sale, pressuring players to purchase the ever ubiquitous “big bag of X” for the low price of $99.99.

I hate to make an example of this game, but if mobile wants to be taken seriously alongside “real” titles then it’s going to have to reassess the business model that’s designed for casual engagement and “smash-and-grab” sales. While free-to-play is clearly the model of choice today, there is a right way and a wrong way to handle it. The system utilized in Ultima Forever is particularly egregious and not at all subtle.

With titles like Ultima Forever it’s impossible to separate the cash shop framework from the gameplay elements because they are intimately entwined. Let’s break things down. The currency in Ultima Forever is keys, they come in three types. Bronze, silver, and gold.

Bronze keys drop everywhere in the game from various chests, pots, breakables. They’re plentiful, and can be transformed into silver keys at a 3:1 exchange rate. These keys can be used to unlock chests for common or better rewards.

No problems yet!

Silver keys are more rare. They can generally be obtained by bronze key exchange or lucky chests and/or events. They can also be obtained in the cash shop. These keys can be used to unlock chests for uncommon or better rewards. So far so good. Here’s where things get rough – Silver Keys are used for gear repairs.

Gear suffers frequent durability loss through gameplay and must be repaired in order to retain stats. If you are not paying and you have gear you want to keep, you’re going to have to turn almost all your bronze keys into silver keys for repairs – and skip opening the vast majority of chests. Forget opening chests with silver keys because that means you’re going to be wandering around with broken, ineffective gear. The “repair treadmill” is the critical failure of the cash shop model in Ultima Forever.

Gold keys are the most rare. They can be obtained via special events and the cash shop. These give rare or better rewards from chests and can also be used to repair damaged gear. There’s no real issue here, offering paying players perks for cash is standard.

It comes down to the repair system as the glaring mistake in Ultima Forever. The cost of repair is designed to keep a player on a treadmill forever until purchase is made. Chests can’t be opened for keys, because keys need to go toward repairing gear. This means that quest drops and item upgrades are not happening, because chests are not being opened. This means players just run levels over and over and over and over and never get stronger. This means naked players seek out low level content to farm. Winston, if you want a picture of UItima Forever, imagine a naked avatar stamping on low level slimes forever. That’s not engaging, and it’s not fun.

Outside of the rather pesky and game-capitulating key-rings, the game excels as a quick-hit hack-and-slash perfect for tablets. It’s incredibly easy to collect quests, join up with other players, and run dungeon after dungeon suited to a mobile schedule. Have 5 minutes? There are dungeons clearly labeled and ready to explore. Have 15? Look for something a little more substantial.

Tap and traverse your way through crypts, caverns, and bandit lords. There are reputation grinds and various virtues to level up. It’s nothing at all like the Ultima titles of old, but that’s okay – It succeeds admirably at what it is.

This title is particularly difficult to score because it is a truly excellent game when you take the repair element out of it. The issue with Ultima Forever, and I’m guessing many other titles we’re going to see as “mobile grows up” to take advantage of tablets, is that this element overshadows all else.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Free to Play is an amazingly easy business model to get wrong. Many publishers are looking at free to play games that rake in loads of money and think that as long as the game is free, people will line up to give them money as soon as they start playing.

But that’s not how the F2P games that work, well, WORK.

Free to Play really works when the game is fun from the beginning and does its absolute best to convince the audience that they never need to pay for anything, hooking the audience in and letting them get to at least the mid game before introducing pressures that make the players actually want to pay.

The best and most compelling example is something like World of Tanks, the ingame economy is set up such that players can progress quite quickly through the first five or six tiers (out of ten) of available vehicles, but the requirements increase exponentially from that point on, making the premium account status look desirable, and also makes it progressively harder to keep up with the ingame repair costs by playing only high tier vehicles (though players can just play lower tiers for money, it takes longer), again making it look like a good, but not necessary, idea to get a premium account or vehicle (which are strictly worse in game than equivalent vehicles unlocked through normal play, but earn more ingame currency).

This is balanced with achievable goals at every stage, not just “get the next tank”, but “get a bigger gun for this tank” as well, which have noticable effects on the play experience, which keeps players coming back to get the next thing, and keeps them from ever thinking that progress is too far away to bother with.

By balancing that curve so that the incentive to pay doesn’t kick in until the player already has time and energy sunk into the game and therefore already places value on their account based on their time playing the game, and always giving them simultaneous immediate and long term advancement goals with noticable gameplay effects, they are more likely to pay money for that account.

If you are too forward with the attempts to get the audience to pay, by curtailing their progress at all if they don’t (rather than just making it take longer or be a bit more inconvenient) they don’t stick around and play the game, so they don’t value their game account, so they don’t pay.

This review is spot on. Repair just kills most of the enjoyment of the game. If it were only possible to sell gear collected in dungeons, that would help adjust the balance of bronze/silver keys being constantly sought for repairs.

The problem isn’t EA.. the problem is with people who refused to pay anything over .99 for something labeled an “app” when the market was young, but will pay $30+ per month on IAPs without thinking twice. EA will make more money with their Simpsons app than any of their AAA titles, you can’t blame them for continuing to sell donuts.

As a result we get these “games” for our powerful mobile devices which can’t be taken seriously as anything but a open drain on our bank accounts. Any achievements earned or enjoyment gained is ruined by the fact that we just spent not only our time, but hundreds of dollars to accomplish anything. Anyone we see who has advanced far in such a game can’t be congratulated for their hard work or dedication, simply because we know it was achieved mainly by spending money.

The only reason IAPs have moved beyond only cosmetic improvements, to blatant advantages, all the way to a requirement for meaningful advancement is because we’ve shown developers we are willing to pay. People will have to get tired of it and stop shelling out money before it stops. I’m not expecting the situation will improve anytime soon.